political philosophy

The Right is now having a new version of an old fight. Is a person’s success or failure mainly dependent on his personal choices or on the operation of larger, impersonal forces over which he has no control? The key word here is “mainly.” No reasonable person believes that economics, culture, and history have no influence over human choices. At the same time, no reasonable person believes that individuals — especially in contemporary America — are entirely imprisoned by circumstance.

…The populist wave built, and with it a tale that sounded very strange to conservative ears. The struggling white working class had been victimized. It needed primarily a political rescue. The notion that the government can help at the margins but that self-improvement is mainly up to the individual was replaced by an angry victim narrative. And the victimizers? The “elites,” of course.

History isn’t just “one damn thing after another,” of course; it seems more like “the same few damn things over and over again in recurrent cycles.” In his book The True and Only Heaven, Christopher Lasch complained about the trendy mindset that saw the decade (or perhaps the generation) as the basic unit of historical time. Analyzing history in bite-sized ten-year chunks, he argued, encouraged a shallow perspective better suited to observing fashion trends and consumer goods. And yet, the longer I live, the harder it is to avoid the impression that every “new” idea is just one that’s been out of fashion long enough for an increasingly attention-deficient culture to have forgotten why it was discarded in the first place. The “rational” alternative to the revitalized socialism of both the national and international varieties is a STEM-mongering liberalism in thrall to the technocratic delusions of Auguste Comte. History seems like just as much of an absurd joke viewed through the wide-angle lens.

Schopenhauer, with his usual perkiness, said that human existence was primarily an oscillation between boredom and despair. A less-morbid perspective might say that there is a virtuous mean worth aiming for, however difficult it is to attain it, but most people occupy themselves rushing back and forth between the stupid ideas on either side of it.

Glenn Loury’s calls for personal responsibility in the black community, his defense of patriotism—even his disposition—indicate that he is a conservative. Yet he remains hesitant to adopt the “conservative” label, and especially the “black conservative” label. When I ask him about this reluctance, he replies with characteristic sense of humor. Social pressure, he answers, makes it difficult for professors to come out as conservatives. “When they get finished with you on Twitter for being a black conservative,” he laments, “there’s not very much left of your reputation.”

There has been a significant increase in recent years of posts and articles which mull over the precision, or lack thereof, in political taxonomy. Is you is or is you ain’t? Max Boot’s recent book notwithstanding, this seems to be largely one-way traffic; if there are dozens of examples of conservatives wondering if they have suddenly become liberal or been liberal all along, I’m unaware of them. I figure this correlates with the leftward lurch over the same period known as the Great Awokening, which abruptly stopped the music and left many liberals standing without a seat to endure the jeering of their former peers. Well, throughout history, exile has often produced great poetry and literature. So far, we’re only getting a lot of navel-gazing and linguistic quibbling, but we can hope.

Personally, I find David Warren’s schematic to be as useful and accurate as any: rather than left and right, fashionable and unfashionable; rather than red vs. blue, a color wheel. It sounds almost facetious at first, but as Bertie Wooster would say, he has rung the bell. I examine it narrowly and I find no flaw in it. It is the goods. From now on, I identify as hexcode #587b56.

I don’t have any investment in whether or not the term “cultural Marxism” usefully describes anything, but I don’t find Alan Jacobs’ rejoinder to Zubatov convincing. Too many academic arguments like this strike me as little more than an opportunity to show off one’s command of arcane scripture for its own sake. But, as Paul Johnson said about Marx in Intellectuals, “Virtually all his work, indeed, has the hallmark of Talmudic study: it is essentially a commentary on, a critique of the work of others in his field.” As Marxism increasingly loses its ability to say anything useful or meaningful about the world, any discussion that invokes the prophet’s name will likewise quickly disappear into the doctrinal weeds.

At any rate, after attempting to clarify the definition of “Marxism” according to the earliest writings of the patriarch, Jacobs says, “So, if we grant that Marx and Engels are Marxists…” Well, as long as we’re being pedantic, Marx himself said to his son-in-law Paul Lafargue, “If anything is certain, it is that I myself am not a Marxist,” so…? Besides, if “Marxist” can be used to describe something useful about twentieth-century political regimes, which, strictly speaking, all deviated from original principles and predictions, why couldn’t it be similarly adapted to say something useful about modern-day disciples of Gramsci and Lukács?

He continues quibbling with Zubatov:

It is equally clear that one can believe that an advocate “for the persecuted and oppressed must attack forms of culture that reinscribe the values of the ruling class, and disseminate culture and ideas that support ‘oppressed’ groups and ‘progressive’ causes,” without endorsing any of the core principles of Marx’s system. (There are forms of conservatism and Christianity that are as fiercely critical of the ruling class as any Marxist, while having no time for dialectical materialism or communism.)

True enough, but if you accept the widespread idea that Marxism is itself a Christian heresy dressed up in pseudoscientific 19th-century terminology, those particular differences seem unremarkable. My own impression, as I’ve said, is that Marx’s “single-minded, fanatical devotion to an abstract ideal of a transformed world strikes me as more akin, in today’s world, to that of radical Islamists than members of a political sect.” It probably does grant too much gravitas to our contemporary glib, self-styled revolutionaries to call them any type of Marxist; it seems the modern revolutionary struggle is mainly focused on highly-educated knowledge workers seizing the memes of production for the mundane purpose of distinguishing themselves from their peers. I think that shows the essential benevolence of capitalism, don’t you? Instead of sticking the severed heads of our ideological enemies on the city gates as a warning to others, we turn them into harmless accessories for disaffected youth to posture with.

Joking aside, I do want to note that the article by Samuel Moyn, which kicked this whole kerfuffle off to begin with, made the argument that the term “cultural Marxism” was mostly an anti-Semitic slur. For all the endless sensationalism in our media here about the supposed resurgence of fascism, it’s ironically amusing that the most anti-Semitic political movement with an actual chance of attaining state power is Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party, which, you’ll never guess, happens to contain an impressive number of unreconstructed Marxists. As a common Marxist phrase went, it is no accident, comrade.

Some liberals, particularly classical liberals, can share some values with conservatives (and so also define themselves as conservatives), but their liberalism tends to emphasize the freedom of markets and individuals. As such, they often seek to minimize the state provision of such things as financial assistance for the unemployed, elderly and disabled and single-parent or poor families as well as being opposed to nationalized healthcare and schemes intended to increase the representation of underrepresented groups within profitable areas of work. This is because they believe this to limit freedom, autonomy and individual responsibility and be ultimately unproductive of social progress. They may also oppose attempts to strengthen gun control (in the US) and support home-schooling for these reasons. They are likely to support a smaller government, less government regulation on businesses, and consequently lower taxes.

Left-wing liberals typically disagree with them about this because we are motivated by values which are left-wing. Being liberal rather than socialist, we largely support the freedom of markets but there is also a strong focus on supporting the most vulnerable in society. For this reason, we also want some regulation in there to prevent exploitation of the poorest people with the fewest options. This focus on supporting the most vulnerable in society is a primary one and has historically been for the benefit of the working class but also, when warranted, for women and for racial and sexual minorities.

Sites like Areo and Quillete have been busy with an ongoing project to build a rhetorical border wall to protect their rationalist, proceduralist liberalism from the identitarian hordes of the postmodern left, and this is the latest brick to be added. I realize it’s just a blog post and not a policy paper, but still, even being charitable, you can already see some of the bromides and confusions that cause bystanders like me to be skeptical that “true” liberalism can ever be saved from tumbling downhill to a messy logical conclusion.

To read this, you might get the impression that at bottom there’s essentially an argument between compassionate liberal lefties who want to “support the vulnerable” in society and a sterner conservative wing who “oppose” welfare and regulation and want to push the poor and disabled out to sea on ice floes. In reality, as William Voegeli has written, even here, in the ruggedly individualist U.S.A., the regulatory state has done nothing but grow since it began. Assuming that they actually exist, any arguments between bleeding-hearts who merely insist that there should be a welfare state and the heartless who insist that there shouldn’t be one are entirely academic and moot. There is one, and it grows increasingly larger and more sclerotic regardless of which party is in power; whether it achieves its aims effectively and efficiently is a whole ‘nother argument. Many of the hyperventilating headlines you see about conservatives wanting to “slash” the safety net and “curb” entitlement spending are actually referring to the tendency of social spending to grow more slowly under Republican administrations. Not to go in reverse — just to grow more slowly. Even in the Reagan years, the Dark Ages as far as contemporary progressives are concerned, welfare state spending grew. As Voegeli notes, 1% growth for eight years may be much smaller than the left prefers, but it’s still a positive number. The real problem, he adds, is their inability and/or refusal to ever make an honest attempt to identify what “enough” might look like, or how we might recognize it if we ever achieve it. Looked at in this way, a dramatic confrontation between cruel robber barons and compassionate New Dealers becomes more like an inter-departmental bureaucratic squabble between policy wonks over who gets the corner office. Not exactly the stuff to quicken the pulse and get the adrenaline pumping, which is no doubt why we prefer to portray routine budget battles as life-or-death struggles between good and evil.

Then there’s that whole “equality of opportunity” issue (which, as Chidike Okeem has argued, is itself a utopian idea, even if it’s being claimed by those who consider themselves opposed to utopian leftists). Pluckrose puts it as clearly as I’ve ever seen it stated: “schemes intended to increase the representation of underrepresented groups within profitable areas of work” — i.e., we couldn’t care less how many sanitation workers are white men; we’re only interested in making the lucrative and prestigious fields more “diverse” in terms of superficial characteristics. Earlier, she mentions “equal opportunity in relation to removing any barriers that prevent certain groups in society from accessing all the opportunities it offers.” As with most abstractions, that sounds nice. The problem is that word, “groups,” which pops up in both sentences. It is, you might say, the banana peel at the top of the slippery slope. Once you start concerning yourself with “representation” in response to perceived injustice, you’re a sociopolitical feng shui practitioner, rearranging society’s demographic furniture to, like, free up the inequitable power flow and create some groovy multicultural vibes of social justice. Once you start framing justice in terms of aggregate totals and demographic generalizations instead of individuals, you’re implicitly accepting the logic of identity politics, no matter how many times you call your identitarian opponents the “regressive left.” Once you start tugging on the thread of “unearned” advantages, you end up unraveling the whole world, because there never was, nor will be, a state of perfect equality in which everyone had exactly the same opportunities as everyone else. There’s no sturdy, meaningful distinction between the “good” kind of identity politics, which merely thinks it would be cool ‘n’ empowering ‘n’ stuff if only there were more female Puerto Rican orthodontists, and the “bad” kind which sees such disparities as prima facie evidence of structural oppression. Freddie deBoer, in his usual combination of penetrating insight, astonishing naïveté, and honesty to the point of self-defeating tactlessness, came right out and said it in so many words: if you’re really that concerned with equality, you’re going to have to be against social and economic mobility. He was, again, clear-sighted and honest enough to admit that that would be fine with him, but I doubt many other liberal lefties will care to back him up, even if that means remaining mired in cognitive dissonance. If you move beyond “equality of opportunity” as a soothing phrase to nod along with, you find that what you’re really asking for is, as Thomas Sowell put it, equalized probabilities of achieving given results. You’ll then quickly realize that this is impossible due to everyone’s favorite buzzword, privilege. “Unearned” advantages can accrue to individuals through something as simple as growing up in a stable family where bedtime stories are read every night. There is no way to quantify, let alone fairly allocate, all the countless variables that make one person turn out more successful or contented than another, and there’s no way to compensate for those gaps by converting them into a cash equivalent and handing them to the disadvantaged. Stating this too baldly tends to get one classified as a conservative, which is why most progressives are content to settle for making vague rhetorical gestures in the direction of greater “equality” without adding much substance.

And that brings us to what Richard Hofstadter said, in regards to the essence of the New Deal, was “not a philosophy but a temperament.” Or, as the economist Robert Lekachman said, liberalism is more of an attitude than a program. It’s that vague, equivocating, finger-to-the-wind attitude that makes this type of liberalism seem so uninspiring, and that makes reading this growing genre of essays so unrewarding. It strikes me as a firm stand for unobjectionable values, a concern with optics more than substance, an interest in triangulating more than in clearly defining. Liberalism, in the last half-century or so of American politics, primarily defined itself in opposition to a caricature of conservatism. Like a permissive, “fun” parent, it left the rule-making and discipline-imposing to its conservative spouse while it granted indulgent favors to the kids. Now, those kids, rather than being appreciative for growing up in a more caring, non-judgmental environment, have turned into spoiled, angry little monsters, and as is often the ironic case, the parent to whom they show the most spite and ingratitude is the one they see as softer and weaker, the one who tries to occupy the middle ground, splitting the difference and pleasing no one as a result. I wish Pluckrose’s “liberal lefties” well in their battle to reassert authority over their mutant offspring, though I still suspect that there’s just something in the left-wing DNA that inevitably produces them, regardless of anyone’s good intentions. Besides, as someone who lived through the supposed bipartisan, neoliberal consensus following the Cold War, when history had supposedly ended and all ideological identitarianism had been laid to rest, I have little doubt that even if today’s intersectional left and their fraternal alt-right twins disappear, we’ll be right back to where we were in the ’80s and ’90s, bitterly fighting over the narcissism of small political differences. I remember Poppy Bush being called a fascist, ferchrissakes.

On the other hand, the policy agenda favored by nearly everyone on the American left resembles more than anything else the political, social, and economic arrangements that prevail in northern Europe, and especially in Denmark. Is Denmark a socialist country? If it is, then there is no meaningful distinction between socialism and liberal democracy — at least when the liberal democracy has a generous welfare state and a modestly regulated, mixed market economy. Given the political history of the United States, doesn’t it make more sense for the left to understand itself, and to explain itself to voters, by making connections with the Democratic Party’s own record of advocating for just such an expansive form of liberalism (rather than “socialism”)?

What the left really seems to want is a return to the administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt — a New Deal 2.0 for the 21st century.

Well, yes. To the extent that the American left can be said to have any serious ideas and proposals for achieving their objectives, as opposed to a vague collection of postures and grievances, it seems clear that they’re motivated by nostalgia for the decades between the New Deal and the Great Society. Of course, those golden years produced a generation of spoiled brats who were convinced that they had grown up in a tyrannical dystopia that needed to be burnt to the ground, so, given that human nature hasn’t dramatically changed in the meantime, I’m not sure why people think we’d be any more likely to appreciate a reinvigorated welfare state this time around. Still, though, it’s true that most of the inane chatter about “socialism” is either fear-mongering or status-signaling. The invasive managerial state grows in tandem with technological sophistication toward a Brave New World future regardless of which party is in power. Like generals fighting the last war, political junkies rehash century-old arguments over socialism and laissez-faire as if it’s relevant. Even the wispy fantasy of a Danish-style social democracy dissipates on contact with cultural and demographic realities.

Yet, as Kristian Niemietz has observed on his side of the ocean, people who used to claim to only want to see their society become a little more like Scandinavia or Germany have held a finger to the prevailing cultural winds and started signaling their affinity for something more extreme. (Thankfully, we seem to be behind the trend over here.) Sure, Owen Jones and most of his fellow Guardianistas have always been fatuous fools. And sure, despite the fact that it would be impossible to imagine teen and ladies‘ fashion outlets fawning over anyone who proudly proclaimed herself on TV to be a national socialist (“I’m literally a Nazi, you idiot!”), it’s also clear that Sarkar is embarrassingly ignorant about what she’s actually saying; she’s only bright enough to recognize a high-status opinion that will win her praise from her peers. But slippery slopes have to start somewhere, and the bromides that pass for received wisdom among cultural elites seems like as good a place as any. Why are we, especially those of us who don’t believe in any sort of Whiggish progression to history, supposed to rest assured that experiments with extreme leftism could never happen again?

Which brings us to the real point — as Jordan Peterson was recently wondering, what is the limiting principle of the left? How far is too far in pursuit of equality? Why do so many people still believe in some Platonic ideal of “true” socialism, existing outside of space and time, independent of all the failed attempts made on Earth to realize it? Why are we supposed to believe that a New Deal 2.0 would be enough, and not a springboard for a renewed drive to eliminate all inequalities? Regardless of how overblown the rhetoric surrounding socialism may be in our political environment, one can still be wary of the unreconstructed left-wing longing for utopia. Too bad our fellow travelers never had to go through the equivalent of denazification after the fall of the USSR.

Before I begin, I should recap the argument of this book: First, the rust of human nature is eating away at the Miracle of Western civilization and the American experiment. Second, this corruption is nothing new; nature is always trying to reclaim what is hers. But this corruption expresses itself in new ways at different times as the romantic spirit takes whatever form it must to creep back in. Third, the corruption can only succeed when we willfully, and ungratefully, turn our backs on the principles that brought us out of the muck of human history in the first place. The last point, which is the subject of the next chapter, is that the corruption has now spread, disastrously, to the right, not just in America but throughout the West.

Louis C.K. did a funny bit about how our pettiness and short-sighted selfishness keeps us from enjoying conveniences which would have been considered utterly miraculous only a few generations ago. “Everything is amazing right now, and nobody’s happy!” he exclaimed. Winston Churchill famously said that democracy was the worst form of government, except for all the others that have been tried. Jonah Goldberg has essentially combined those perspectives into a book-length meditation on our current political environment, pleading with us to recover a spirit of gratitude for what he calls the Miracle; i.e. Western democratic capitalism and the release it has granted us from the hardship and want of the pre-industrial age.

Goldberg, though a religious believer, presents a case designed to appeal to skeptics and atheists. There is no God to save us from our mistakes and tragedies. Life is a constant struggle against material and cultural entropy. The Miracle, though successful, is highly unnatural, forcing us to adopt new habits of living which defy all the tribal instincts ingrained through eons of evolution. The Miracle was only achieved through good fortune, and can easily be lost again with no guarantee of return. Various forms of what Goldberg groups together under the rubric of “romanticism,” from left-wing utopianism to right-wing blood-and-soil nationalism, all promise to heal our alienation and make us whole again; all of them are pernicious lies.

An earnest plea for psychological balance and sanguine perspective will no doubt seem like a pitiful thing in a melodramatic, hyper-political age, but hopefully the seeds of Goldberg’s argument will find receptive ground among the bystanders. Having long since come to the same tragic perspective on my own, I didn’t need any additional convincing, but nonetheless, it was good to read an eloquent expression of it. Sometimes, there’s nothing more that needs to be said beyond hear, hear.

Peterson had been noodling some ideas about this question: How do we know when the Left goes too far? He made the point that on the right, everyone knows Nazis are evil. They’re something bad and something we don’t want to be and this moral judgment was clearly illustrated at the Nuremberg Trials, but that there is no such limit on the Left.

It was one of those rare instances of serendipity. On June 25th, 2015, I read an essay by George Santayana, “Josiah Royce,” in which he wrote:

Yet that is what romantic philosophy would condemn us to; we must all strut and roar. We must lend ourselves to the partisan earnestness of persons and nations calling their rivals villains and themselves heroes; but this earnestness will be of the histrionic German sort, made to order and transferable at short notice from one object to another, since what truly matters is not that we should achieve our ostensible aim (which Hegel contemptuously called ideal) but that we should carry on perpetually, if possible with a crescendo, the strenuous experience of living in a gloriously bad world, and always working to reform it, with the comforting speculative assurance that we never can succeed. We never can succeed, I mean, in rendering reform less necessary or life happier; but of course in any specific reform we may succeed half the time, thereby sowing the seeds of new and higher evils, to keep the edge of virtue keen. And in reality we, or the Absolute in us, are succeeding all the time; the play is always going on, and the play’s the thing.

Suddenly, I understood. I saw, vividly, what I had only understood abstractly before: that the crusading would never stop. There was no limiting principle to left-wing political efforts, nothing that would serve as a reasonable goal or endpoint. Today’s vanguard will be denounced as tomorrow’s reactionaries by a new group of radicals demanding more, faster, better.

The very next day was when the Obergefell ruling was handed down. And Freddie deBoer, whom I had previously held in high esteem as an intelligent alternative to orthodox leftists, immediately tweeted, “Now on to polygamy. (And no, I ain’t kidding.)” He followed that up with, “Y’know, fellow left types who say today’s not a good day to start talking polygamy, ‘slow down’ is a derided stance for a reason.”

I have no problem with gay marriage. And I don’t think that poly-anything will ever be more than a fringe fad. In other words, my road-to-Damascus moment wasn’t motivated by any visceral fear or loathing of the newest phases of the sexual revolution. Like Roger Scruton as a student in Paris in 1968, watching the rioting of the soixante-huitards, I simply realized that regardless of the merits of any particular culture-war crusade, in the grand scheme I was watching “a kind of adolescent insouciance, a throwing away of all customs, institutions, and achievements, for the sake of a momentary exultation which could have no lasting sense save anarchy.” Nothing would ever be good enough. Nothing will ever satisfy people whose anger and misery is existential, not situational. Like Scruton, I realized that these people would eagerly tear down many of the imperfect things I loved about the world in pursuit of unattainable perfection, and that I was tired of being associated in any way with their endless complaints and histrionics.

Ever since Bacon and Descartes, we’ve been increasingly accustomed to shaping the world to our preferences. As our technical mastery increases, we find it harder to accept the existence of anything which impedes “progress,” whether personal or political. How do we know when the Left goes too far? To answer that, we’d have to be capable of envisioning a world of “good enough,” and I’m not sure if human nature even allows for that. What sort of epochal revolution would have to occur in order for humanity to envision an alternative to progress that didn’t involve some romanticized past? Individuals will continue to have private epiphanies where they make peace with an imperfect world and resign from the crusades, but the species as a whole will continue to be what Nietzsche called “the unfinished animal,” endlessly striving to bring more of life under its control, forever dissatisfied with what actually exists.

Lefty friends keep asking me if — or telling me that — I’m a conservative now. But I’m just a liberal who remembers what they’ve forgotten. I remember what it meant to be a liberal back when I really started to identify as one, back around 2000, during Bush v. Gore, 9/11, the PATRIOT Act, the Iraq War. Of course, I may just have been gullible. Maybe it meant something different before that and maybe it came to mean something different after. Maybe it’s all just “tribal” signifiers, all just flags and symbols. But if it is, the forgetting must help, and that just isn’t what I’m good at.

“I’m not a conservative; I’m merely nostalgic for the simple politics and moral certainties of a bygone age, which just happens to correlate with my youth!” That’s not being entirely fair to either conservatism or Traldi, but it’s still funny. Lately, these “I didn’t leave the left; the left left me” pieces are becoming popular again, which is at least one thing that hasn’t changed much from the Dubya Bush years. During the Cold War, it was common for defenders of the liberal West to note the simple fact that it was unnecessary to put up walls and guard towers to keep their populations from escaping en masse. Likewise, it might be useful for these agonizers to reflect on why the traffic in these political conversion stories tends to be mostly one-way.

The culture wars will continue to be marked by both sides scoring an unrelenting series of own-goals, with the victory going to whoever can make their supporters shut up first. The best case scenario for the Right is that Jordan Peterson’s ability to not instantly get ostracized and destroyed signals a new era of basically decent people being able to speak out against social justice; this launches a cascade of people doing so, and the vague group consisting of Jordan Peterson, Sam Harris, Steven Pinker, Jonathan Haidt, etc coalesces into a perfectly respectable force no more controversial than the gun lobby or the pro-life movement or something. With social justice no longer able to enforce its own sacredness values against blasphemy, it loses a lot of credibility and ends up no more powerful or religion-like than eg Christianity. The best case scenario for the Left is that the alt-right makes some more noise, the media is able to relentlessly keep everyone’s focus on the alt-right, the words ALT-RIGHT get seared into the public consciousness every single day on every single news website, and everyone is so afraid of being associated with the alt-right that they shut up about any disagreements with the consensus they might have. I predict both of these will happen, but the Right’s win-scenario will come together faster and they will score a minor victory.

The Lady of the House was telling me the other day about an article that explored why fandom can become so toxic. For example, the barrier to entry for becoming a Harry Potter fan is very low. To differentiate themselves from the herd, hardcore fans basically have to create tiers within their subculture to make it more exclusive for them. There’s no status in having and enjoying the same thing as every teenage mallrat. By contrast, a higher barrier to entry makes it easier for a niche group to be more welcoming to newbies, as they can trust that anyone who’s here has earned the right to be here.

Listening to her, I remembered some webcomic from several years ago which amusingly noted the differences between the social-justice left and the far right with regards to their outreach programs, shall we say. Basically, it’s easy and trendy to be on the left, and you see this reflected in the contemptuous attitude that hardcore SJWs hold toward anyone who isn’t already part of the in-group. Outsiders were frequently treated with hostility from the start, as I witnessed countless times when the social-justice virus first spread through online atheism. People who earnestly tried to engage in discussion were accused of “JAQing off” and told that it was a sign of privilege to expect answers to their stupid questions. There already existed an elite caste whose main concern was to demonstrate their higher social rank by competing to see who could be the most excoriating toward the outgroup. The highly-stigmatized far right, on the other hand, was more than happy to oblige curiosity from newcomers. Oh, you got attacked for your “white privilege,” huh? Yeah, that’s typical leftist hypocrisy, enforced by the liberal media. Would you like to learn more? Here’s some information, and oh, by the way, there’s a group that meets on Wednesday nights if you’d like to come by and hear so-and-so speak! Bring your friends!

Like I said, I saw that comic several years ago, so it seems especially prescient in hindsight, now that most of us have had occasion to rub our eyes and wonder where all these outright neo-Nazis came from all of a sudden.

In any event, right-wing politics, even of the moderate, mainstream variety, has long had a higher barrier to entry for most people. It often seems too pessimistic, too unsympathetic, too severe, too demanding. There’s no cultural status to be had in being conservative. People often age into it with experience rather than get argued into it with facile reasoning. It has struck me, though, as it has likewise apparently struck Alexander, that the shifting tectonic plates in the domestic political landscape seem to be opening up some fissures which could perhaps be filled by a more reasonable, approachable center-right coalition typified by individuals like Peterson, Harris, Haidt, Pinker, etc. With a generous helping of good fortune, maybe this trend might develop from a cultural faction into a new conservative party, leaving the big two to continue becoming more extreme. Granted, that’s only if-this, then-that, unless-this, in-which-case-that speculation. I’m certainly not holding my breath for a viable third-party option anytime in the near future. But as the Republican party continues to accommodate Trumpian populism and adapt to it rather than tame it, I can’t help but wonder where the newly-homeless conservatives are going to end up. Are they going to continue to wait out what they hope is a temporary spell of madness, or will they eventually walk away and possibly encounter the refugees from the left somewhere in the middle?

Those who contend that conservatives, in particular, overstate the threat on campus make several claims. These are the works of only a handful of misguided “college kids,” they contend. The few instances of extreme behavior on campus are not suggestive of any broader societal trend and don’t merit much attention. In fact, the limited scope of the problem, therefore, suggests that that conservative indignation is false–a convenient way to avoid confronting anti-social behavior among their ideological compatriots. All of this is fallacious.

Everyone believes that slippery slopes exist. We just disagree on their precise location and steepness. Or, you could say we’re all frogs in a pot of water, arguing over whether the temperature has noticeably increased in the last few minutes. Talented sophists can certainly make plausible cases for prioritizing attention toward almost any area of concern, from social to economic to environmental ills, but there’s no objective standard of proof that would settle these arguments with finality. Hume’s famous problem of induction still haunts us here — the fact that we can identify a developing trend doesn’t guarantee that it will continue. We’ll only know who was right with the benefit of hindsight one day. However tiny it may be, there’s still a leap of faith involved in choosing which issues are worth our attention and which can be safely ignored. And in our frivolous culture, where, despite all the sturm und drang, no one honestly expects things to drastically change one way or the other, arguments over what right-thinking people should properly be focusing their limited time and attention on become just another way of flashing our tribal I.D. badges.

I’m a conservative by temperament, if not by party affiliation. If I vote at all, it almost certainly won’t be in any election beyond the state level. To me, our sclerotic political institutions are like the Olympian gods of ancient Greece, completely beyond our control or fathoming, only worth keeping a wary eye on in the possibly-vain hope of not being crushed underfoot as they pursue their mysterious goals, heedless to the destruction they cause down below. I think that despite endless bipartisan ranting and raving, life is generally pretty good in this country, even for people without a lot of money or power, and that it provides a fair amount of freedom for people to live as they wish. The idea of man as a fallen creature prone to weakness and vice strikes me as portraying a psychological truth if not a religious one. I don’t believe that any amount of money or comfort, let alone any new sociopolitical arrangement, will make people content, because it’s too easy and tempting for people to be weak, lazy and prone to blame their unhappiness on something else. While not a Stoic, I do agree that the only thing most people achieve by complaining is becoming proficient at it and prone to practice it relentlessly. Obsessing over politics in particular causes most people to walk around with their own personal storm clouds permanently thundering in their heads. Work hard, treat people well, do your best to accept and ignore things beyond your control, and just get on with it — that’s the basic framework of my approach to life.

Most of all, I share the typically-conservative tragic view of life, in which perfection is inherently unattainable. It’s more than enough work for most people to cultivate the character and practice the good habits necessary to keep from accidentally or maliciously destroying the fragile blessings in life. The game always ends in defeat, so to speak, so it’s more important to play it well. To this end, art, music, and literature, also known as the humanities, are the greatest source of succor and solace this side of the River Styx. This is why I make my stand there. The humanities are the greatest respite we’ll ever have from our worldly tribulations, and these abhorrent philistines only care about turning them into just another branch of radical activist politics, with all the misery that entails. In everyday life, with limited time, energy, and resources at our disposal, it obviously makes sense to prioritize problems and tackle them in order of importance. In the big scheme of things, though, when we’re talking about problems that are global in scope if not existential in nature, that sort of one-at-a-time approach won’t work. Adolescent barbarians vandalizing their cultural heritage will never rise high enough on the list of pressing issues to be considered worthy of attention. Prioritizing be damned; some things are simply worth fighting for on principle, and this is the one I choose.

I write in my notebook with the intention of stimulating good conversation, hoping that it will also be of use to some fellow traveler. But perhaps my notes are mere drunken chatter, the incoherent babbling of a dreamer. If so, read them as such.

Vox Populi

The prose is immaculate. [You] should be an English teacher…Do keep writing; you should get paid for it, but that’s hard to find.

—Noel

You are such a fantastic writer! I’m with Noel; your mad writing skills could lead to income.

—Sandi

WOW – I’m all ready to yell “FUCK YOU MAN” and I didn’t get through the first paragraph.

—Anonymous

You strike me as being too versatile to confine yourself to a single vein. You have such exceptional talent as a writer. Your style reminds me of Swift in its combination of ferocity and wit, and your metaphors manage to be vivid, accurate and original at the same time, a rare feat. Plus you’re funny as hell. So, my point is that what you actually write about is, in a sense, secondary. It’s the way you write that’s impressive, and never more convincingly than when you don’t even think you’re writing — I mean when you’re relaxed and expressing yourself spontaneously.

—Arthur

Posts like yours would be better if you read the posts you critique more carefully…I’ve yet to see anyone else misread or mischaracterize my post in the manner you have.

—Battochio

You truly have an incredible gift for clear thought expressed in the written word. You write the way people talk.